Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Agile Developer Skills Workshop--Day Two

So imagine an organization, run by the agile community (or a large subset of it--at least the people that have shown a trustworthy commitment), that is in charge of defining the set of skills we find useful in being a member of an Agile Team. This group would be involved in:-defining an Agile Skills Inventory (e.g., Active Listening, Story Splitting, Test-driven development)- providing a repository for reference courses- defining self/peer assessments- defining a quest ecosystem- experience reports- characterization of external courses (for a fee?)- rating of trainers for a particular course

Well, this is what we're trying to imagine, and here's how we attacked it today--in several sessions. The group asked me to help facilitate (thanks, Pat, it was a great honor! though I'm not sure if I did in fact keep us on task):

We pondered what value this system would produce, so we talked a bit about supply and demand:

Then we talked about the idea of "a quest ecosystem", or points, or merit badges, or achievements, and ultimately thought it could be called tokens. Basically, we'd like to acknowledge the work people do to improve their developer skills:

Then we tried to clarify what this Agile Skills Project would be all about:

Essentially, what we see right now is that the community would own and maintain the ever-evolving definition of agility, then certify training organizations/courses/study material against the standard. To help developers, these 'certifications' would characterize the courses; alternative free methods would also get characterized as well--so then it's up to the developer to take a course or teach oneself.

To further help the community, we'd have a 'token' system, by which team members could go on learning 'quests' or exercises, which would be recorded in a web site as an experience report. This report would be rated by peers and generate points for both the reviewer and reporter. These points would not be fungible, would have no external worth, but could be used to help people categorize their own strengths and weaknesses, to prioritize further learning quests.

One of our group members took some of the initial 7 pillars work (technical excellence, collaboration, product understanding, supportive culture, business value, confidence, continuous self improvement) and made a wordle picture: